FYI Anyone can see your name, email, and AWS ID/Access Key.<p>The games on Stripe's CTF were more secure than this site...<p>EDIT: Looks like it was just patched. Still managed to get a few dozen AWS keys though.
This sounds great, but since this is using your own AWS account, there is a very serious poison pill; Glacier only lets you retrieve 0.17% of your data for free per day. Beyond that, you get charged based on <i>your peak hour</i> of retrieval.<p>How much? $7.20 per gigabyte for your highest hour (minus a negligible free allowance if you're using it in this manner).<p>i.e. the cost to restore m gigabytes over n hours is:<p>$7.20 * m / n<p>I'm sure Ice Box Pro will have warnings in place, so nobody will get a $350 bill by accident by restoring a 50 gig account in an hour.<p>But for disaster recovery, the time will come to decide between a large bill or a very slow retrieval.<p>Pricing details are here (though quite difficult to follow):
<a href="http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/#How_much_data_can_I_retrieve_for_free" rel="nofollow">http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/#How_much_data_can_I_retr...</a>
For an open source alternative (and my tool of choice) check out git-annex with s3[1]. joehy has a todo for git-annex and glacier[2] and someone has already submitted the beginings of a patch. When i first heard of Glacier I was excited about the possibilty of using it for a backend to git-annex, but then I read cpercival's discussion of glacier[3,4].<p>[1] <a href="http://git-annex.branchable.com/tips/using_Amazon_S3/" rel="nofollow">http://git-annex.branchable.com/tips/using_Amazon_S3/</a><p>[2] <a href="http://git-annex.branchable.com/todo/special_remote_for_amazon_glacier/" rel="nofollow">http://git-annex.branchable.com/todo/special_remote_for_amaz...</a><p>[3] <a href="http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2012-09-04-why-tarsnap-doesnt-use-glacier.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2012-09-04-why-tarsnap-doesn...</a><p>[4] <a href="http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2012-09-04-thoughts-on-glacier-pricing.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2012-09-04-thoughts-on-glaci...</a><p>EDIT: Removed comment about competition.
hey guys,<p>i built this with a friend and didn't expect it to get posted to HN already. we just got it approved and i accidentally hit our Like button before we were even ready. my friends immediately commented on the story so we just said, what the hey :-)<p>in any case, it just "launched" today, was only meant for friends to test out, and yes i agree we need to write more copy.<p>to address some concerns:<p>- this is really only meant for developers at the moment; i.e. those who actually know their way around AWS. if and when we decide to take payments and provide a service, you can expect a lot more documentation and support. we have no desire to dupe normal folks. we built this for ourselves and really only expected friends to try it out first.<p>- you don't need to go to your AWS console to get your files. once a file archives, you can click a button to download it back to your Dropbox<p>- putting in warnings about the quota is a great idea! we'll do that ASAP.<p>keep the feedback coming, we really appreciate it and wanna build something useful for everyone.
I'd like to see someone provide a service in a similar vein to this but just for photos.<p>What I'm thinking is a service that uses Glacier to store my photo library and some type of front end service (like dropbox) that keeps a low res version of that photo along with some meta data about it.<p>My reasoning for this is that we all build up pretty significant photo libraries (mines already over 60GB) and I'm always trying to make sure I have them backed up. I currently use a paid plan at Dropbox so I can put them all up there but it's kind of a waste since I hardly ever pull many of them down again. Every once in awhile I browse through them looking for certain pictures that I might need to get a copy of (which is why I'd need the low res copies easy to access/browse) and then be able to choose which ones to pull down from glacier. The other good thing about a service like that is the need is not typically immediate.<p>Maybe I'll look into building this since it's something I'd love to have for myself!
Anything that uses Dropbox as the middleman scares me a bit. Dropbox scares me a bit. It silently ignores a lot of meta data , restores files with dates that aren't what the original was ( last I checked ) and has corrupted a few Mac OS X sparse bundles beyond repair.<p>There's a great app called Arc that handles all of Mac OS X meta data perfectly, works with the relative ease of Dropbox, and backs up to S3 at great savings. De-duplication and other "smarts" are all there.<p>It's sort of like a Time Machine that you can point to S3.
I love the idea, but besides the retrieval fees involved that you're not disclosing, I wonder if people will grasp the fact that the files they are putting into the icebox folder are not reachable with opening the same folder and looking into it—instead you need to go to a web site to find them. This is rather disorienting for a non-technical user as the way of putting files in gives a false sense of immediacy to a future retrieval availability.
The security problem that was found (now fixed) is less of an issue than the responses they gave afterwards: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4619652" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4619652</a>
Wow, I've been working on almost the exact same thing!
Except I'm charging a yearly fee instead of using the users own AWS account, this makes it easier for users without an AWS account and also means you don't have to worry about the crazy Glacier fee structure.<p>Try it out if you want, 1GB accounts are free at the moment:<p><a href="https://www.tidy.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.tidy.io/</a>
Don't give your data to this site until they fix this:<p><a href="http://blog.ryankearney.com/2012/10/never-give-your-information-to-10-minute-old-startups/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.ryankearney.com/2012/10/never-give-your-informat...</a>
This is a little OT, but I was thinking about putting together a weekend (read: week) project that would offer a cloud service (details aren't important) but require a user to add an AWS key. The idea is that it would use the free micro instance Amazon gives a user.<p>The benefit I see is that customers would have total visibility into their own data, and, of course, it's very cheap to run a system like that.<p>I'd love to hear any opinions anybody might have about it.
Trying it now (800mb is uploading).<p>This tool is great for me because the data I'm backing up is something I'll need to access maybe twice a year, or less. But I still need to have this data backed up somewhere.<p>I love how it's as simple as Dropbox. Set it up once, the rest is just drag and drop.
My Dropbox isn’t big enough for the file I would want to send to Glacier.<p>Does Amazon provide a fairly decent interface? Or, failing that, are there clients that can work with AWS Glacier already, the way some FTP clients can speak to AWS S3?
I actually thought about it some time ago and even started working on a prototype, got dropjar.com for that, but after seeing how low companies like backblaze sell unlimited backup for ... I figured it's a hard sell.<p>Good luck with icebox.
Great Idea, although to realy archive terabytes with a relatively small dropbox account you'd have to do it in 10-100 steps.. Recovering it via dropbox would be even more challenging.